St Mary, Parham, Suffolk
By a great sleight of hand, the A12 twin carriageway threads by the most intensely rural coronary heart of Suffolk, and but a mile or so from its course you would not even know it was there. Little, stunning villages are joined by lattices of little lanes which meander sleepily about the fields and copses of sprawling, empty parishes. They are in no specific hurry to get everywhere. In the villages you can even now obtain the occasional outdated-fashioned pub, and for miles about the church buildings are all open each individual day, fairly a lot.
Parham has no pub, but it does have a intriguing church. The coronary heart of the village, pronounce Parrum, is not much off the busy road which connects Framlingham to the A12, and the church is established in a small dip with historic houses in attendance. It dates from a major rebuilding of the late 14th Century. You enter the churchyard by a rather thatched lychgate in the north-west corner, and the graves sprawl away south and eastwards, an desirable but specially uneven and bumpy graveyard.
At to start with sight, the most hanging attribute of the exterior of the church is the massive area of interest on the western facial area of the tower. It possibly held a rood group, the crucifixion in the middle, with John the Evangelist and Mary the Mom of God on either facet. You can see that it would have had a most elaborate cover. The eastern buttresses of the tower are parallel to the tower jap encounter and there are no battlements on the tower, building it feel rather critical, specifically with the very low nave roof. The nave home windows are tall and stately, creating the church seem to be somewhat larger than it truly is. There was a big refurbishment a hundred several years afterwards, for this reason the big window beneath the niche, and the grand north porch, now a vestry.
Unusually for Suffolk, you enter the church from the west, beneath the gallery. The inside is amazingly spacious, supplied that there are no aisles. The making is whole of mild – there is pretty minimal colored glass, and the dado panels of the rood display screen were being removed in the 1880s, leaving just the tracery painted in a gay pink and green. It gave Cautley the horrors, and even manufactured Mortlock tut, but I alternatively like it. The full developing has a perception of house due to the fact of it, unusual in a church so comprehensively restored in the 1880s. The reredos further than is a uncomplicated and seemly structure, a cobbling jointly of 17th century woodwork with a image of the Previous Supper in the Russian style. I would have preferred to have identified the place it arrived from. Previously mentioned it is some excellent 15th Century glass, albeit restored. 4 angel musicians in the higher tracery appear on with the serious faces of that century.
England’s medieval church buildings are deposit and treasure residences of the folk memory of their parish. Right here at Parham the Corrance spouse and children ended up the folks at the Big Residence. Frederick Snowden Corrance was the Conservative MP for East Suffolk, and in 1872 his nine yr previous only son Charles laid the first stone (however it was most likely a brick) of the village college. The developing has now gone, but the dedication plaque survives, and is in the church. It notes that the university was designed by voluntary contributions of the landowners of this parish. An additional plaque documents that, in the pursuing decade, the roofs and pews ended up replaced by a bequest from George Corrance, who was presumably Charles Corrance’s grandfather. His uncle, an additional Charles, was vicar at the time.
There is a excellent set of Restoration royal arms, suggesting the locals ended up happy to see the back of the Commonwealth. But, curiously, if the 17th century communion rails search odd, it is simply because alternate balusters have been taken out by somebody who, presumably, believed it was a good thought at the time. Remembering Archbishop Laud’s principal explanation for installing these types of things in the very first position, perhaps they just desired to permit the canines back in.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2016-09-05 18:36:00
Tagged: , Parham , Suffolk , East Anglia , church
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